Anus Scans New Tool in Fight on TerrorHomeland Security hails Washington LGBT leaders for support as new era dawns in safeguarding identity and e-shopping convenienceBy
Bill Andriette

"At a time when a terrorist or predator could be
literally anyone, the ability of Homeland Security to
continually track and identify citizens and aliens
has become our greatest challenge," declared
department chief
Michael Chertoff, opening an extraordinary April
1st press conference at the US Capitol. Standing
side-by-side were the heads of Washington's LGBT
lobby groups, the Human Rights Campaign and the
National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force. "In meeting this challenge," Chertoff
said, "how fitting to acknowledge the vital role
played by leaders of the political groups who
celebrate 'identity' most."

The dignitaries were
on hand for the unveiling of the
latest weapon in the war against terror-- a
discreet inside-the-bowl blu-ray camera that
quickly scansa user's anus, generating a digital
"Anal Sphincter
Signature," or ASS. The 666-digit code, unique to
each individual, is then quickly checked against the
corresponding entry stored in a national FBI registry
(see sidebar).

For now rolled out only in Butte, Montana, and
Love Canal, New York, the innovative AnuScans are
set to become mandatory in all toilets by July 4th,
2008.

"Once fully launched, AnuScans will track the
position and movements-- bowel and otherwise--
of everyone within the Homeland perimeter,"
Chertoff promises.

"The AnuScan represents not just a triumph of
American technical know-how," he said, "but could
never have been implemented without the vision,
hard work, and sheer political backbone shown by
America's national
LGBT leaders."

NGLTF Executive Director Matt Foleyman
beamed at the accolade and then spontaneously
hugged the DHS chief.

"As a gay American, it was my duty to help my
country fight its enemies," said Foleyman. "But I
also had an obligation to my community to insure
that the Toilet Security Administration-- from its
inception-- undertakes its
vital work in a spirit of fairness and equality."

Bottom-line: justice

Whether the AnuScan works as precisely with
veteran, frequently pleasured anuses as it does with
virginal, cherrylicious ones became a top, secret
concern for national LGBT groups in August 2001,
when plans for the
bottom readers were first whispered in upper-
echelon Washington.

At stake was not just whether lesbians and
gays would be fairly and accurately tracked. As well,
LGBT leaders feared that right-wing Republicans
would seize upon the issue of fuzzy AnuScans to
attack sodomy under
anti-terror statutes.

At an emergency joint NGLTF/HRC summit in
late 2001, the groups' executive staffs examined
disturbing classified data leaked by Rep. Barney
Frank's office. NSA analysts had found that AnuScan
accuracy fell by 80
percent when confronted with well-plowed, winky
"lily pad" anuses compared to tightly clenched
"rosebud" controls. As a result, the devices often
mistakenly IDed gay men as individuals on FBI lists
of AWOL US Marines or militants
in Muqtada Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

"The flawed readings were no joke," Foleyman
contends. "For gay men using public toilets for
non-sexual purposes, it meant risking one-way
tickets to lockups at Camp Pendleton or
Guantanamo Bay."

Once jailed, there would be little hope.
PATRIOT Act III provides for automatic 30-year
prison terms for falsifying one's identity to federal
agents. And each of the 48 million in-toilet
AnuScans on order from defense
conglomerate Brown & Root has been deputized as
a Toilet Security Administration "officer."

Reports that AnuScans could b
e tricked by users with prolific anal experiences
under their belts were indeed seized upon by
Republican Washington. In January 2002, Florida
Rep. Mark Foley drafted legislation to classify
anal sex involving males over 18 as "aiding and
abetting."

"When perverts pack fudge, they may as well be
cooking up phony American passports and pilot
licenses for Al Quaeda operatives," Foley told a
closed-door session of the US Armed Services
Subcommittee.

And yet frustratingly, say LGBT activists, the
same hard-right Republicans refused the modest
$15 billion request that Homeland Security together
with Brown & Root insisted was necessary to re-
engineer the AnuScan to
the tighter tolerances required for looser, bloomy
bottoms.

"It's as if they wanted a faulty homeland-
security technology just so they could spite LGBT
Americans," the NGLTF's Suzanne Hide tells
The Guide. "That's not just unfair, it's
pathetically unpatriotic."

The thuggish meets the inane

That's when an unexpected alliance itself
"bloomed" between Homeland Security officials and
the leadership of the inside-the-Beltway LGBT
lobby groups. DHS wanted lesbigay support for the
$15 billion outlay, of course.
But more importantly, officials say, they needed to
marry the Washington groups' political expertise to
Brown & Root's top-dollar engineering talent.

The secrecy of this collaboration meant it was
one job that could not be delegated to the HRC's
and NGLTF's young interns and pages. Rather, the
LGBT groups' senior executives-- excusing
themselves for pretend
meetings on Capitol Hill-- made trips to Brown &
Root's "Skunk Works" at Fort Meade.

In the laboratory-- rigged up to simulate a
lavatory-- the LGBT executives in turn squatted and
strained "like pregnant pigs in labor with an
unusually large and unruly litter," recalls one DHS
official who attended the
arduous sessions.

On the other side of the faux toilet
stall, Brown & Root scientists struggled themselves,
endlessly tweaking the device's optics and
frequencies to no avail. At last, one night last July,
with Foleyman working in the lavatory,
the scientists found just the right aperture and
shade of azure ray. They knew they'd hit paydirt
when the monitor wirelessly attached to the test-
toilet's AnuScan spontaneously displayed
Foleyman's precise Social Security
number, prescription drug records, recent Amazon
purchases, and Manhunt.net user profiles.

Foleyman was previously famous for working
with New York State lawmakers to drop the word
"sodomy" from the statute books in exchange for
sharply increasing penalties for consensual gay sex
offenses. Later he
won notoriety for urging authorities to throw the
book at a troubled Spokane mayor who had made
online gay sex-chat with fully-fledged adults. But
for his collaboration with Brown & Root engineers
last July, Matt Foleyman
passed from the annals of gay politics into those of
science.

The key moment came, researchers who were
present recall, as Foleyman simulated vigorous
toilet use, and the AnuScan's blu-ray beam
suddenly found it wasn't bouncing off plush rectal
walls as expected, but the
cavernous base of the NGLTF Executive Director's
skull.

"This was the exactly challenging anatomic
limit-case we needed for a breakthrough," Brown &
Root engineer Colin Dowell reveals. "That's what set
us on the path to find the advanced pinhole optics
that allow us now to
scan anuses accurately across the rainbow
spectrum."

With certified-equitable AnuScans now ready to
roll off Guangzhou assembly lines, the Toilet
Security Administration says that accurate, real-
time tracking of predators, suspected terrorists,
vulnerable children, and
other Americans will create unexpected benefits.

Already, Brown & Root scientists have proof-
of-concept for a new generation of extra-toilet
AnuScans designed to work at supermarket
checkouts. With all banking records indexed to
consumers' ASSes, buying groceries
may soon be as easy as bending over and spreading
one's cheeks.

"Paying through the nose will be a thing of the
past," Foleyman quips. "But seriously, saving time
and money, and having the state continually affirm
your location and identity is what we at NGLTF feel
freedom's all about."